Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionIV. Dispositional Theories 13. Allport: Psychology of
the Individual© The McGraw−Hill^385
Companies, 2009same time, they possess the capability of change. Pattern coexists with growth, order
with diversification.
In summary, personality is both physical and psychological; it includes both
overt behaviors and covert thoughts; it not only issomething, but it doessomething.
Personality is both substance and change, both product and process, both structure
and growth.
What Is the Role of Conscious Motivation?
More than any other personality theorist, Allport emphasized the importance of con-
scious motivation. Healthy adults are generally aware of what they are doing and
their reasons for doing it. His emphasis on conscious motivation goes back to his
meeting in Vienna with Freud and his emotional reaction to Freud’s question: “And
was that little boy you?” Freud’s response carried the implication that his 22-year-old
visitor was unconsciously talking about his own fetish for cleanliness in revealing
the story of the clean little boy on the tram car. Allport (1967) insisted that his mo-
tivation was quite conscious—he simply wanted to know Freud’s ideas about dirt
phobia in a child so young.
Whereas Freud would assume an underlying unconscious meaning to the story
of the little boy on the tram, Allport was inclined to accept self-reports at face value.
“This experience taught me that depth psychology, for all its merits, may plunge too
deep, and that psychologists would do well to give full recognition to manifest mo-
tives before probing the unconscious” (Allport, 1967, p. 8).
However, Allport (1961) did not ignore the existence or even the importance
of unconscious processes. He recognized the fact that some motivation is driven by
hidden impulses and sublimated drives. He believed, for example, that most com-
pulsive behaviors are automatic repetitions, usually self-defeating, and motivated by
unconscious tendencies. They often originate in childhood and retain a childish fla-
vor into adult years.
What Are the Characteristics of a Healthy Person?
Long before Abraham Maslow (see Chapter 10) made the concept of self-actualization
popular, Gordon Allport (1937) hypothesized in depth about the attributes of the ma-
ture personality. Allport’s interest in the psychologically healthy person goes back to
1922, the year he finished his PhD. Not having any particular skills in mathematics,
biology, medicine, or laboratory manipulations, Allport (1967) was forced to “find
[his] own way in the humanistic pastures of psychology” (p. 8). Such pastures led to
a study of the psychologically mature personality.
A few general assumptions are required to understand Allport’s conception of
the mature personality. First, psychologically mature people are characterized by
proactivebehavior; that is, they not only react to external stimuli, but they are ca-
pable of consciously acting on their environment in new and innovative ways and
causing their environment to react to them. Proactive behavior is not merely directed
at reducing tensions but also at establishing new ones.
In addition, mature personalities are more likely than disturbed ones to be
motivated by conscious processes, which allow them to be more flexible and
Chapter 13 Allport: Psychology of the Individual 379